The next example—an anonymous one—makes no bad third—
"Here Hobson lies among his many betters,
A man unlearned, yet a man of letters;
His carriage was well known, oft hath he gone
In Embassy 'twixt father and the son:
There's few in Cambridge, to his praise be't spoken,
But may remember him by some good Token.
From whence he rid to London day by day,
Till Death benighting him, he lost his way:
His Team was of the best, nor would he have
Been mired in any way but in the grave.
And there he stycks, indeed, styll like to stand,
Untill some Angell lend hys helpyng hand.
Nor is't a wonder that he thus is gone,
Since all men know, he long was drawing on.
Thus rest in peace thou everlasting Swain,
And Supream Waggoner, next Charles his wain."
The couplet printed below touches a pretty note of imagination, and is wholly free from that suspicion of affected scholarly superiority to a common carrier, with which all the others, especially Milton's, are super-saturated—
"Hobson's not dead, but Charles the Northerne swaine,
Hath sent for him, to draw his lightsome waine."
Charles's Wain, referred to in these two last examples, is, of course, that well-known constellation in the northern heavens usually known as the Great Bear, anciently "Charlemagne's Waggon," and more anciently still, the Greek Hamaxa, "the Waggon."
Coming, as might be expected, a considerable distance after Milton and the others in point of excellence, are the epitaphs printed in a little book of 1640, called the Witt's Recreations, Selected from the Finest Fancies of the Modern Muses. Some of them are a little gruesome, and affect the reader as unfavourably as though he saw the authors of these lines dancing a saraband on poor old Hobson's grave—
"Hobson (what's out of sight is out of mind)
Is gone, and left his letters here behind.
He that with so much paper us'd to meet;
Is now, alas! content to take one sheet.
He that such carriage store was wont to have,
Is carried now himselfe unto his grave:
O strange! he that in life ne're made but one,
Six Carriers makes, now he is dead and gone."
XXV